Announcing the NanoDesu Translations Forums!

And so, we finally announce the big news we’ve been holding in for weeks. A lot of the staff (big thanks to DaigakuOtaku especially) have been working tirelessly on getting this forum up and running and looking super sexy for everyone. And so,

Everyone is encouraged to register and post. A lot of our staff have been posting already, so there are plenty of topics already for you to read and reply to (of course, you should also feel free to make your own).

Also congratulations to our puzzle contest winners (there were four of them) who were awarded early access to this forum. In case you were curious, I’m including a solution to the puzzle below.

ENJOY EVERYONE!

-NanoDesu

Puzzle Solution:

If you read the introduction text in the puzzle, it should be fairly clear that the volume numbers are the important objects to find. If you do that, you should arrive at a number layout like this:

1 2 1 1

6

3 1 8 5

Now, the question is what to do with these numbers. One way is just brute force – try random things until you make something sensible of them, which actually is possible here. However, there are two clues that might aid you:

(1) The way the numbers are arranged and divided suggested that the COLUMNS are what is important.

(2) There was a more subtle clue (that I didn’t expect many people to notice) in the last line. “learn how to read novels in Japanese” was actually a sneaky clue that tells you exactly how to read these numbers: right to left, top to bottom!

Putting these two clues together means our numbers are now reduced to:

6/1 5/1 8/2 1/1 3

There are a few things you could try now (adding the numbers in each division, etc.). But you can already see that if you reduce it to just five numbers:

6, 15, 18, 21, 13

Then these five numbers seem random but are all between 1 and 26! Which means it might be a good idea to change these numbers into their corresponding alphabet letters, with 1–>A, 2–>B, 3–>C, etc. etc. Doing that, you arrive at the final answer: